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‘Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past’- George Orwell

The last Clerk in South Africa’s Supermarket of colour has closed the shop. The Saint among sinners flew home. Go thee, well-de Clerk! For the young ones who might have not known much about the tragedy called the apartheid regime in South Africa, it was a history of segregation between the white and black in South Africa, it was a history of racial supremacy whereby the black was made to scrub the floor with their skins while sunshine continued to beam its beauty on the skin of the white.

It was a history of oppression of the black by the repressive regime of the white.

The black bore the burden of indignation, oppression and repression for scores of years before Fredrick de Clerk became Prime Minister and reluctantly ended the scourge of history that held the South African black hostage! De Clerk, the last of the clique is dead!

In Chile, Augusto Pinochet was his country’s nemesis; a brute, sadist megalomaniac dictator, killing and maiming, causing disappearances and launching terror on his own people and others.

He was a deeply fake man who presented himself as a common man of integrity when he staged a coup against the socialist government of Chile in 1973. He took Chileans hostage! He was by all standards, a crime against humanity who in the latter part of his life arrested for his cruelty but died in 2006  before justice could be served.

Chilean Pinochet said there wasn’t flesh on the ground even while his hands were drenched in blood.

Yes, we live in the same denial in Nigeria today, accepting the worst of evil as normal; normalizing mass murder, kidnap and sundry crimes.

Now, the extrajudicial murder of nine persons doesn’t look like a massacre to rulers that are used to swimming in pools of blood.

A nation that covers her sins can never prosper. Lekki happened and it was beyond massacre. It was the holocaust! Truly they opened the gate of death at Lekki and shut the Gate of Truth in Abuja. Glory be to God who made open the secret evils of the abominable in their dark coven. The lid is off.

Lies have evaporated. END SARS Protesters were callously killed, inhumanly treated and demonically denied of any vestige of sorrowful and remorseful mourning. With the national flags on hand, the young people were tragically petted with bullets. They were taken hostage, even their dead bodies!

Since I had not done it, it is great to use the opportunity of this reflection to commiserate with the United States that not too long ago lost a patriot, a trojan and a warrior; Vietnam war veteran and the intrepid capon of the Gulf holocaust, whose skin and position was evidence of American liberal libertarianism. Collin Powell, a military mechanic in the powerhouse of hostage diplomacy is gone.

Rest thee well, the Jamaican-American that Iraqis would not forget in hurry! While it is pleasant to condole with Americans, this article is exotic in content; a complex mixture of power and behaviour at different spaces; personal space, family space and public space. Simply put, a review of hostage occurrences and power play at private and public spaces with the astonishing craze for power and privilege.

While Powell’s remains are being interred, it is almost certain by the virtue of America’s Marriage Acts, his body is not likely to be taken hostage by ‘wives’ who are nurtured to believe that marriage, even after spousal death provides a new vista to chart a new path from rags to riches, using spouse’s lifeless body as bait to beat horror of poverty by widowhood validation.

In Nigeria, boundaries of marriage, even though properly defined by-laws remain fluid and often complicated by cultural practices that accommodate the most absurd model of relationship. The problems become more infernal after the death of a spouse; worse if the death is intestate, without Wills! From Group Capt Gbolahan Mudashiru through Dr Tosin Ajayi of First Foundation and recently; Capt Hosa Okubo and Rear Admiral Ndubuisi Kanu, women have been virulently fighting over their husbands’ dead bodies. Could these be fighting for ‘love’ or for money? Could these be cases of fortune in the graveyard or Gold diggers at sepulchres’ gold mine? Is it not violence against ‘dead men’ or payback time? Is polygamy not a ‘poly-trouble’? a lifelong hostage? Indeed, the evils that men do live after them. As Fela sang ‘na double wahala for deadi bodi and the owner of deadi bodi’!

In Nigeria today, life is though, for couples still alive, not to talk of the ones that have lost their breadwinners.. Food Items have astronomically climbed the last rum of fiscal cost.

Domestic fiduciary allocation at home could not proportionally respond to such hyper inflammable running inflation. Disposable income is shrinking and the capacity to make effective demand on basic necessities remain diminished.

It is now difficult to avoid domestic higgledy-piggledy in most homes.  Puglia Infinitum has set in and an astronomical increase in domestic violence validates this! Homes are held hostage by hunger, disease and poverty and the spillover effects are marooning the street with chaos and escalating anarchy.

There is no hostage taker that is as cruel as bad governance; even in a democracy, we walk into its snare by making the worst of us to govern the best of us. We are the architects of our misfortunes.

We should stop bringing the archetypal consolatory God’s Will into the equation of our legendary abetting of bad governance. God has always sent Early Warning Signal to Nigerians at every junction of national danger. In defiance, we always ignore these warnings and make rulers after our prejudiced hearts. We are now ‘on the march again, looking for Mr.

President among the enemies our souls. One with a satanic mission to steal, kill and destroy. Affliction will rise again if the only road we know leads to the Red Sea whose navigator is not Moses!

Those days, we used to call solidly heavy and weighty bread of twenty Kobo, special bread. We were ashamed whenever fellow students saw us with bread at the University of Benin in the 80s because bread used to be a badge of poverty and misery. Then, you will be hailed as a ‘Marco Polo’ major by fellow students.

The bread was called Marco polo at Uniben, then! In fact, O A Lawal in his O/Level Economics described bread as a Giffen Good; good that could ever be of any value if its price goes up. Today, bread has been installed as a king by Buharinomists. When next you see Bread as an Urhobo man, just say Mgwor Sir.

A Yoruba man should just prostrate and hail the Buhari-made-king, the Oniburedi of Breakfast Kingdom. For those who are in need of history, bread led to other grievances to ignite the French Revolution of 1789. It did not spare England, either! Bread has overthrown Emperors, demolished kingdoms and put to flight an army of powerful tyrants.

That should be warning for the rampaging hostage warriors whose authority is often affirmed by the many they can make poor or poorer!

 Gbenro  Olajuyigbe is the Executive Director, of Emergency & Risk Alert Initiative